Look, jerk. I’m made of brushed steel. I have bevels. Ground smooth, not a rough edge on me. My refinement is as plain as day. I was designed by a very famous firm in the Hoboken region of New Jersey, and it shows.

Not only do I look fabulous, but I’ve got the goods on the inside, too. Finest materials available, precision welded, sturdy as an ox. You could toss an empty magnum of Château Lafite-Rothschild in me and I wouldn’t even feel it. Go ahead, I won’t dent! I was born for this. I’m classy bin, see? A cut above.

So how did I end up in a joint like this? I wish I knew. The food is passable enough, I suppose, here at the Boudin Bakery. I’m ok as long as I think of it as a rustic adventure. The working conditions could be better, though. The things people try to deposit in me range from manageable to downright appalling. Chowder in a bread bowl? Cute, but beneath me. Sandwiches? Unless they’re watercress, I don’t want to hear about them. Kindly keep the remnants of your pedestrian chicken pesto on sourdough to yourself, thank you very much! Having to accept used napkins is unpleasant, but necessary. I don’t like it, but I understand it. I do it because it’s part of the job and I’m a professional.

But what really gets me is the paper plates. They’re made of wood pulp, recycled from god knows where, compressed into porous, ragged-edged things that soak up everything that comes in contact with them. How vile. Do you want to touch someone soaked paper saturated with a 5 year-old’s half-chewed chili? Neither do I! You can slip one past me if you hold it upright and on the diagonal, but what I’m really hoping with this “hole too small for plates” tactic is that you just take them to the less exclusive formica-covered particle board garbage bin in the food court. You know who I’m talking about… the ones who wear stacks of returned trays like ridiculous hats, flashing their engraved THANK YOU smiles like they’re grinning for the dentist. Some might call it form over function, but hey—even bins have standards.

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape.

That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.

This does indeed sound laughably naïve to those of us familiar with tapes, but it makes perfect sense to someone who isn’t: most playback devices—portable and desktop music players as well as TVs and bookshelf and car stereos—have built-in EQ curves designed for, and named after, a particular genre of music.

To make the music play, you push the large play button. It engages with a satisfying clunk, unlike the finger tip tap for the iPod.

We can add another piece to the pile of anecdotal evidence that the younger generation still values tactile feedback, even though they’re growing up using a higher percentage of purely virtual interfaces. This is borne out by the fact that mobile phones with full physical keyboards seem to be getting more popular despite the increased bulk and expense.

…But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down “rewind” and releasing it randomly – effective, if a little laboured.

I told my dad about my clever idea. His words of warning brought home the difference between the portable music players of today, which don’t have moving parts, and the mechanical playback of old. In his words, “Walkmans eat tapes”.

Further confirmation that users will try to bend products to fit their needs and mental models regardless of what it was designed for. This is a constant challenge, and a reminder to check in a see how things are actually being used in the wild.

If your product is service or software, you can let your users keep a hand on the wheel of the development roadmap with their behaviors. This is why I think APIs for web applications are particularly valuable: they give users the freedom to bend products without the frustrations of breaking them, and you allow the user base to develop and test new features for you. Everyone wins.

This email does what it says: it provides an instant view of what’s going on now, what was going on before, and what’s going to happen next. It’s a complete communication that leaves no room for uncertainty. Both the text and typography are clear and concise, using everything that’s needed and nothing that isn’t.

My hat’s off to my co-worker, Terence—awesome work.

Today, at the bank, I went to get some coffee from their machine. I gave it my money and pressed the buttons but nothing was happening. After banging on the machine for ten minutes and calling a teller over, a little boy reached up on his tippy toes to press the giant green START button for me. FML

It’s easy to laugh at the author if you don’t look too closely, but there are a few usability lesson in this story:

First, the user already signaled the machine that they wanted to start by putting their money in. Under what circumstances is a customer going to put money into a vending machine when they don’t want to buy something?

Second, once a user takes an action they think will produce a result, they’ll tend to disengage and wait for it. It generally doesn’t matter how big your button is or what text you display—the user won’t see it.

Third, if the expected result doesn’t happen, they’ll probably do what this person did and assume whatever they’re using is broken instead of looking for clues to what they might have done wrong.

It seems like they had perfectly reasonable expectations: put money into a vending machine, select what they want, and get it. Having a start button, no matter how big it is, is inconsistent with our mental model of a vending machine. Even giving the designers every possible benefit of the doubt—that their target user somehow has no mental model of vending at all—it’s still an unnecessary step that should have been left out.

Proposed solution: figure out what the user’s expected result is for each action is and give it to them. Don’t get clever, and don’t expect them to read anything, especially when you break a very common mental model. Don’t break them unless you have a really, really good reason.

Proposed solution: figure out which one I’m using and tell me.

This piece of paper stuck to a new refrigerator is really arrogant on the part of the manufacturer. The message I get from this is, “We used tape on your fridge that we know damages it. Now you have to spend extra time and money to fix our mistake. Guess what? We don’t care!”

Not only is that just plain rude, but it also makes me wonder what other shortcuts they knowingly took that I’ll be paying for. That’s a problem for me. The problem for the company is that my perception of the brand has been significantly degraded. Is that a really a worthwhile trade-off?

This stuff is specifically for eyes—including the eyes of children and pets. So why is the applicator tip made of metal? Last I checked, eyeballs + metal = danger! Particularly in the case of small beings who are in pain (if they weren’t, they wouldn’t need this stuff in the first place), squirmy, and generally wary of things they don’t understand coming at their eyeballs.

It would be much better—and safer—if the applicator were soft and flexible, like a cannula.

So according to this department store sign, if I want to go to floor 1, I go… up?

This sign is effectively a map and should therefore be ordered to depict the physical space it represents instead of how we count. Put the bottom floor on the bottom, where it actually is.

(CAPTCHAs are those pictures of distorted text that you sometimes have to re-type to prove you’re human instead of a spambot.)

AT&T is now offering free AT&T Wi-Fi access to our iPhone™ customers. That means free AT&T Wi-Fi access at thousands of hotspots nationwide, including Starbucks®. Hotspots are available in cafes, bookstores, airports, hotels and universities nationwide.

Fast net access at no additional charge? Nice. All you have to do is follow these simple instructions:

Activate Wi-Fi from the settings icon on your iPhone.

Select "attwifi" from the list of available networks.

Enter your 10-digit mobile number and check the box to agree to the Acceptable Use Policy. Tap "continue."

You will receive a text message from AT&T with a secure link to the AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot. You will not be charged for the text message.

Open the text message and tap on the link for 24-hour access to the AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot.

I do see their point. Automatically recognizing iPhones by MAC address and having it just work would deny people the satisfaction that only comes from really laboring for something—like MMS messages.